Worlds

20. Welcome to the Party

After the absurd questioning downstairs, and the hide-and-go-seek nonsense that preceded it, I was ready to tell Will he could stick it, and leave. Then I got two sudden shocks.

The man who opened the door was blind, with huge surgically implanted lenses set in his eye sockets. I’d read about them, but of course had never seen any, not in New New.

The second shock was Benny. When I saw him sitting there, I thought for a moment that it was all an elaborate joke. Nobody was laughing, though. The blind man introduced me to everybody, saying “You know Benny, of course.” Benny gave me a funny look and I gave him one back, I guess.

The blind man, James, fixed me a cup of tea. “For the benefit of the two new people, let me outline what we do here.”

“Does this outfit have a name?” Benny asked.

“No.” Since the lenses were fixed in place, James had to turn his whole head to look at you. The effect was riveting, machinelike. “We use various names for various purposes. Sugar?”

“No, thanks.” He stared at the teacup as he brought it over to me.

“It all sounds very mysterious, I know. Let me try to put your minds at ease.” He sat down and looked at Benny. “We do nothing illegal, at least not beyond the level of misdemeanor.”

“I once got arrested for littering,” the woman, Katherine, said.

James nodded slightly. “Handbills. We are a pressure organization, Benny. We write letters, organize rallies, use cube time, and so forth. On another level, we gather information about the government and analyze it, in hopes of eventually building an accurate picture of the country’s actual power structure.”

“Then why all the secrecy?” I said. “It seems to me you’d want publicity instead.”

“Mostly insurance. It’s true that we could operate in the open now, though we could expect a certain amount of harassment. Conditions may change, though—the government becoming more oppressive or, perhaps, our tactics becoming more extreme.

“In essence, we do have a public side, since many of our members belong to other organizations with ambitions similar to ours. We are not shy of using them.

“We cover a rather wide ideological spectrum, but we are basically libertarian and humanitarian. We believe that the government exercises too much control over individual freedom, and does it in ways that most people are powerless to resist. We want eventually to establish a truly representative form of government, with strong controls on its use of the broadcast media as tools for mass conditioning.”

That struck a chord. The commercials on the shows that preceded the Worlds boycott referendum were scary. Subtle and powerful.

“But why me? I’m not even a citizen of this planet.”

“That’s exactly why. Your objectivity, and experience with other political systems. For your own part, you might consider it a trade; I understand that you plan on politics as a career, once you leave Earth. What you learn here, helping us with our analysis, can only help you later on. Also, the people you meet might prove valuable contacts, eventually.”

“If you get into power,” Benny said.

He swiveled. “Some of us do have political ambitions, of course. I think most of us are only interested in seeing the present system replaced by one more responsive to the actual needs of the electorate.”

“You’re planning a revolution,” Benny said.

“Not actively,” James said.

“Where would we get weapons?” The short man, Ray, bustled across the room to fill his cup. “You can’t fight a modern army with knives and homemade bombs.”

“Not every state has New York-style laws.”

“Sporting weapons,” Ray said. “Rifles and shotguns. Sorry, you can fight without me.”

“Well, there’s always Nevada,” Benny said. “You can buy anything from a hand laser to an atom bomb there.”

“But you can’t get it out,” James said. “The border guards are—”

“If you can buy an atom bomb, you can buy a CBI man.” I was a little surprised to see Benny talking this way.

“You seem to have given the matter some thought,” James said.

He shrugged. “Revolution is inevitable. Whether anything will come of it, I don’t know. It may depend on how prepared we are.”

“If you had proper organization,” I said, “and the support of most of the people, you might be able to do it without sophisticated weapons. That’s how the Vietnamese won.”

James laughed. “Looks like we’ve recruited a couple of fire-breathers.”

“Theory’s cheap,” Ray said, and James gave him a sharp look. “If it did come down to fighting, would you do it? Would you kill people?”

“I don’t know. The situation has never come up.” Benny touched his knife, probably an unconscious gesture. “I suspect I could kill if somebody was trying to kill me. Of course, it wouldn’t always be that way.”

Ray nodded, apparently satisfied. James shook his head, microscopically. (Suddenly I visualized what the world must look like to him when he shakes his head or nods.) “I, for one, hope it can be done without violence. None of you is old enough to remember the Second Revolution. I was ten. It was a terrible time.”

“And look what it accomplished,” Katherine said. “You men. How can you even think of… doing that again?”

The fourth man, Damon, had been sitting silently, alert He was tall and black. “Katherine. We all would prefer reform to revolution. But we can’t proscribe violence as a possible final resort. It is the State’s last resort against us.”

“Which they will only use if we provoke it,” she said.

“Please,” James said, “this is all familiar ground. Shall we get on with the week’s business?”

Katherine reported on a rally and petition drive, which she had organized but didn’t take part in physically. Ray had been in Washington for the past couple of days, where he had cultivated the friendship of the man who took care of the Senate’s steam room. He’d learned nothing beyond the level of idle gossip, but the man obviously could be an important contact some day. Damon had just come back from two weeks in Ketchikan, where he had tried to make contact with a group of non-Separatists, without any success.

Finally, James asked whether Benny and I might be willing to do some work for the organization.

“What happens if we say no?” Benny asked.

“Nothing drastic. We would ask that you not tell anyone about us, and of course we would watch you for a while. Or you may just want some time to think about it; that’s all right, too.”

“Tell me what it is you want.”

“Well, we want to take advantage of your writing skill.” He opened a briefcase and handed Benny a thick envelope. “This is stationery with the letterhead of the ‘Committee of Concerned Citizens,’ which has no members other than yourself. Be careful to handle it in such a way as not to add fingerprints to it. The fingerprints on it belong to the Swedish printer who made up the stationery, and the paper itself would be difficult to trace: it was made by an Italian firm that’s been out of business for twenty years.”

“Sounds like you want a ransom note.”

He smiled. “Not quite…. Write on a Praktika or Xerox machine; they print with stabilized burners that don’t vary from machine to machine.”

“There’s one in the Drama library.”

“Good. We need seven letters, to senators whose votes are crucial to S2876, a bill having to do with public disclosure of corporate income taxes. There’s a shit-sheet on each senator, with at least one fact that would be embarrassing if it were given to the media.”

“Blackmail?”

“Not if you word the letters correctly. Willing to try?”

Benny shrugged. “Okay.”

“Good. Send me copies at the address on the envelope.

You’ll find the senators’ home addresses inside; it would be well if you mailed from Grand Central or the main P.O.” He turned to me. “Marianne, how’s your statistics?”

“Math is my worst subject.”

“But you can program?”

“Of course. I’m not illiterate.”

“Good. This is a fairly simple job.” He handed me a folder with two sheets of paper in it. “We’re trying to verify consensual links between various supposedly antagonistic Lobbies. We’re fairly sure the links exist, with the result that the same people stay in power no matter which way an election goes. What you’ll be doing is pairing up voting records, trying to find suspicious correlations.”

“Sounds interesting.” It did, as a matter of fact.

“Keep track of the computer charges; I’ll reimburse you in cash. You, too, Benny.”

The meeting lasted another ten minutes, with Damon and Katherine getting new assignments. Benny and I left together; the others were going to follow at staggered intervals. We took the subway.

Benny looked inside the envelope as we swayed cross-town. “I’m Lloyd Carlton,” he said. “Three-fifty Madison Avenue. Good address.”

“What do you think?” I talked just loudly enough for him to hear. There were several others in the car.

“About the organization? I don’t know, not yet. I’d like to know how much they didn’t tell us.”

“You were talking pretty radical in there.”

“Trying to kick something loose.”

“You almost succeeded with Ray, I think. Katherine wasn’t too impressed. ‘Revolution is inevitable,’ eh?”

“Only if they interrupt the World Series.”